| Counter-drone warfare is going to be huge over the next couple decades, so this is very interesting to see. Drone warfare right now is small in numbers and small in range, because of limitations around the technology — even so it is having a ton of impact on the ground in Ukraine. A good analog might be early World War 1: planes were incredible scouts and they were occasionally disruptive to troops, but it wasn't really practical to deploy them in large, coordinated formations, fit them with heavy payloads, or use them out over the oceans. By World War 2 that entire calculus had changed, with horrifying results for all combatants. Right now an American carrier group might be vulnerable in littoral (shoreline) combat to drones, but retreating even a few dozen miles offshore would be enough distance to dampen the threat — drones just don't have the range and anti-jamming to be useful on the scale of hundreds or thousands of miles. In 15 years though? 10x the range, the speed, the numbers, and potentially outfit a carrier ship specifically for deploying drones en masse. Play the same scenario out underwater with "drone carrier submarines". The key question for all American military commanders and defense contractors to answer: how do you shoot down 1,000 drones without losing a ship? |
A hangar of 10,000 anti-drone gnats. Barring a breakthrough in high explosives, an anti-drone drone will be lighter and cheaper than an anti-ship drone. We played this game with planes and boats.